Sacrilege, or Something Like It

That's what critic William Logan (fearless, forthright, he just doesn't care) commits in the pages of The New Criterion when he writes (the bolding is mine):

I have never been a great fan of Nabokov’s fiction, which reads as if
composed by an eighteenth-century automaton with only a flywheel for a
heart. I make a partial exception for Lolita, but only
partial—its set pieces are outrageous and surprisingly sad, but the
deserts of prose between defeat me. (That the tale can no longer be read
so blithely will remain as much of a problem as the use of “nigger” in Huckleberry Finn.
We are no longer in a century when sex with twelve-year-olds is
considered amusing. That does not mean that we stop reading, merely that
there is resistance to overcome.)

That's the kind of taste declaration that makes heads fall off and roll like bowling balls in the lanes of the finer literary establishments, which exist only in our imaginations, but still.

The occasion for Logan's is a review of Nabokov's Selected Poems, a just-published volume that includes poems previously uncollected or untranslated from the original Russian and might better have been left interred in musty antiquity.

The Russian poems have been rendered into a kind of mock Victorian by
the novelist’s late son, Dmitri. What are we to make of stanzas like
“Undisturbed the dragonflies hover,/ like diamonds sparkle their wings,/
encircled by snowy-white roses/ that follow the font as it sings” or
“Across the basin’s water/ the magic flame will float;/ accoasts in
rapid order/ the little nutshell boat”? Accoast, so far as I can
discover, has not been much used since the day of Spenser. When the
father writes a panegyric to Shakespeare (about whose identity Nabokov
seems to have had doubts), the son can do no more than turn the lines
into monstrosities like “Thus was enfolded/ your godlike thunder in a
succinct cape” and “Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder,/ you
hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard!” The subject might be some Mitteleuropa dictator, the translation done by his worst enemy.
It’s no use suggesting that the sins of the son have been visited upon
the father. Nabokov’s own translations are better, but not much better.
[snip]

Nabokov was often afflicted with a hyper-aestheticism that makes his
verse at times cold meats from Ronald Firbank’s table (the verse reveals
the underbelly of Nabokov’s prose): the poems are fatty with words like
“semi-pavonian,” “lyriform,” “macules,” “marron,” “cacodemons” and
such, with lines like “she took me by my emberhead” or “They burn the
likes of me for wizard wiles/ and as of poison in a hollow smaragd/ of
my art die.” The problem is not that Nabokov the poet doesn’t write half
so well as Nabokov the novelist; the problem is that he doesn’t write
half so well as Lolita.

The pay-off line?

You can learn from Nabokov a hundred ways to write poetry badly, but not a single way of writing it well.

I'm reminded for some reason of the famous quip by Baltimore Oriole ace starter Jim Palmer about O's manager Earl Weaver: "The only thing Earl knows about pitching is that he couldn't hit it."